Bug in Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist 2.0 could cause a second weblog to be deleted when using MT’s “Delete Weblog” command. Needless to say, if you use MT-Blacklist, don’t delete any weblogs until this is fixed. Greg Storey just got bitten by this bug.

Monday, 22 November 2004

MIT Technology Review reports on Republican-sponsored legislation that would make it illegal to fast-forward through TV commercials or to use iTunes’ music-sharing feature. Say good-bye to Rogue Amoeba’s entire product line if this passes. (Via Political Animal.)

Here’s a nasty one: popular tech news site [The Register] was
hit on Saturday by [the Bofra exploit], a nasty worm which
uses an iframe vulnerability in (you guessed it) Internet
Explorer to install nasty things on the victim’s PC. Where it
gets interesting is that the attack wasn’t against the
Register themselves; it came through their third party ad
serving company, Falk AG.

Saturday, 20 November 2004

Scot Finnie with an extensive, effusive review of Firefox 1.0. This is very much a Windows-oriented review (for a Windows-oriented publication), but if you’re trying to convince Win/IE users to switch, this is the review to point them towards.

When America Online purged its tiny Nullsoft branch of all
but three employees this week, it lost arguably the most
prolific division of the company. Not that you could really
blame AOL for the mass layoffs—all of Nullsoft’s projects
were spitballs tossed at the honchos upstairs. Before the
AOL days, Nullsoft founder Justin Frankel and his team of
whiz kids practically invented the MP3 craze when they
rolled out their Winamp player and Shoutcast server. When
AOL paid millions to buy the then-20-year-old Frankel’s
services in 1999, he used his new gig to become what
Rolling Stone called “the Net’s No. 1 punk.”

SpamSieve
2.2.2 adds support for
Growl notifications, opens up some customizability for
Apple Mail and Entourage users that was previously only
available to AppleScripters, and includes the usual
round of accuracy improvements, enhancements, and bug
fixes.

Sunday, 14 November 2004

Saturday, 13 November 2004

Quinn’s masterpiece was a dramatic proof of concept. […]
For his demo, he booted an iMac off the Mac OS X
installation CD (thus proving no custom software on the
target iMac) and then plugged in a another Mac. All of a
sudden, fire appeared at the bottom of the target’s screen,
overwriting the bottom of the installer’s screen. Quinn
simply blitted a fire animation over Firewire to the
target’s video ram. Great job.

On the Mac side of things, Goodger said Firefox 1.0 uses
Apple’s QuickDraw technology to draw to the screen, while the
Windows version uses GDI. However, he said the next big move
for the Mac version of Firefox would be away from QuickDraw.

QuickDraw, which Apple created in 1984, was the basis for 2D
screen presentation in the Mac OS. With the advent of Mac OS
X, Apple moved away from QuickDraw to its PDF-based Quartz
rendering system, which is now incorporated in the Core
Graphics architecture of Mac OS X.

“We were most focused on the feature set and user interface,”
Goodger said. “Maybe not for the next couple of months, but
we plan to move Firefox” to the more modern rendering system.
Firefox’s reliance on QuickDraw, he said, is due to the fact
that the low-level code of Firefox comes from Mozilla’s
Netscape 6 and 7 projects, which was largely coded in the
years 1999 to 2001 for the Mac OS 9 operating system.

Friday, 12 November 2004

I have no idea why so many people thought this was a joke. I still don’t know what to make of it, but other than his crack about “keeping your iPod warm”, Jobs clearly wasn’t joking when he announced them. (The point, I suppose, is to keep your iPod from getting scratched/smudged while floating in your backpack/purse/gym bag.)

Tuesday, 9 November 2004

Just when you think ICANN can’t fuck things up any worse than they already have.
According to Netcraft:

Domain names could become easier to hijack as a change in
domain transfer rules takes effect Friday. Under new rules
set by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and
Numbers (ICANN), domain transfer requests will be
automatically approved in five days unless they are
explicitly denied by the account owner. This is a change
from current procedure, in which a domain’s ownership and
nameservers remain unchanged if there is no response to a
transfer request.

Corporate Web professionals labour under the delusion that
they can stay insulated from trends in Web development.
They feel free to create expensive new sites whose guts are
no different from something published in, say, 1999.
They’re like baby boomers who cannot stand any music
released after 1979. The way they made Web sites while they
were growing up works fine and dandy for them. Not only are
no improvements necessary, as far as they’re concerned
there are no improvements available to make, save for
this Flash thing their kids keep telling them about. Their
way is the state of the art — but, unbeknownst to them,
back when they were learning to build Web sites we had no
idea what the art actually was.

Sunday, 7 November 2004

Note: Make sure that you use BBEdit’s “Auto-Complete
Glossary” command in combination with a keyboard shortcut
with glossaries, otherwise you’re not using them (or BBEdit)
to their full potential! I recommend Ctrl-Return as a
keyboard shortcut. If you set up things this way, you can,
for example with the XSLT glossary, type “val”, hit
Ctrl-Return and BBEdit will insert the full template for
<xsl:value-of ...> into your document.

I also suggest assigning Cmd-Option-Left and Cmd-Option-Right
to the commands “Go To Previous Placeholder” and “Go To Next
Placeholder”.

Safari no longer times out after 60 seconds when attempting to
connect to a webpage or to submit form data. With this update,
Safari will keep trying indefinitely (or until you cancel the
attempt).

Resolves an issue in which the display could sometimes remain dark
when waking from display sleep (the mouse pointer might appear, but
normal function could not be restored) if using Screen Saver
password on a portable computer.

When synching photos, iTunes creates iPod- and TV-size versions of your photos, and those are what get synched. Thus iPod Photo doesn’t need to scale photos for display. But iTunes has a preference to store a full-resolution copy of every photo on your iPod as well.

Monday, 1 November 2004

The heretofore anonymous author/programmer/statistician behind the amazing Electoral Vote Predictor web site has revealed himself: Andrew Tanenbaum, one of the world’s leading professors of computer science. (I read several of his textbooks during my undergraduate C.S. studies.)

I’m curious about this too. Obviously HP doesn’t have them now, and it doesn’t seem like much of a partnership if HP doesn’t get to ship the newer, cooler (and in the case of the iPod Photo, more expensive) models.